Coya Knutson, 82, Legislator; Husband Sought Her Defeat

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

Former Representative Coya Knutson of Minnesota, a fierce champion of family farms, medical research and campaign finance reform and the creator of Federal student loans, died at a nursing home in Edina, Minn., on Thursday, her legislative achievements all but overshadowed by her vindictive husband's ''Coya, Come Home'' campaign that led to her defeat after two terms in 1958. She was 82.

Her son, Terry, said the cause was kidney failure.

If there had ever been any doubts that a woman's place is in the House, they must surely have been dispelled in 1954 when the former Coya Gjesdal unseated a six-term Republican and swept into Congress like a whirlwind from northern Minnesota.

There had been women in Congress continuously for more than 30 years, and Mrs. Knutson, although the first from Minnesota, was one of seven elected in 1954. But it is safe to say that the House had never seen anything quite like her.

A Norwegian immigrant's daughter who grew up on a North Dakota farm, graduated from Concordia College in 1934 and spent a year studying voice and piano at the Juilliard School before returning to North Dakota to teach school, she married in 1940 and settled in the little town of Oklee, Minn., just across the state line.

A tireless campaigner who accompanied herself on the accordion while singing her own campaign song in a lilting soprano, she stunned the Minnesota political establishment when she won the 1954 Congressional election, and when she got to Washington she stunned Congress even more.

Despite her lack of seniority, Mrs. Knutson promptly won a place on the House Agriculture Committee. She subsequently initiated the first Federal appropriations for cystic fibrosis research, introduced the first bill calling for the income tax checkoff to finance Presidential election campaigns and originated the idea and the legislation that established the Federal student loan program.

Mrs. Knutson was an independent-minded woman, and she made her share of political enemies along the way. But, despite opposition from some leaders of her own Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, she appeared headed for a long and brilliant career in Congress as her second term drew to a close.

Then, in May 1958, when her party declined to formally endorse Mrs. Knutson for a third term, forcing her to run in a primary to seek re-election, Andy Knutson, the farmhand she had married 18 years earlier, dropped a bombshell.

In an open letter to his wife, he urged her to leave Congress and return to what he described as the ''happy home we once enjoyed.''

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Never mind that Mr. Knutson, who had once worked on her father's farm in North Dakota, had not shared a bedroom with his wife for years or that he had regularly beaten her so badly during her visits to Minnesota, as their son later recalled it, that she had to wear dark glasses to hide her black eyes from her fellow members of Congress.

Once the resulting ''Coya, Come Home,'' newspaper headline was carried across the country, it created a firestorm of publicity that accepted Mr. Knutson's story as the plaintive truth and portrayed his wife as an uncaring wife who had abandoned her family for political ambition.

Mr. Knutson later stirred the fire by accusing his wife of having an affair with a legislative aide half her age, but although the charge was a blatant fabrication, Mrs. Knutson refused to denounce her husband.

She managed to win the primary, but lost the general election by 1,390 votes to Odin Langen, a Republican who was 6 feet 4 inches tall and campaigned on the slogan, ''A Big Man for a Man-Sized Job.'' There was never any doubt that the ''Coya, Come Home,'' campaign had cost Mrs. Knutson the election, and as it turned out, her political career.

She failed in a comeback bid in 1960, divorced her husband in 1962, and then spent a dozen years working in the Defense Department in Washington before trying another abortive race in 1977, polling 13 percent of the vote in a primary in which one of her opponents was her former legislative aide.

According to her son, who was adopted when he was 8 over the objections of his father, Mrs. Knutson, a deeply religious woman who frequently cited the biblical passage, ''Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord,'' never expressed bitterness toward her husband.

But she was also apparently content to leave forgiveness to the Lord. When Mr. Knutson died of acute alcohol poisoning in 1969, she did not attend his funeral.

Besides her son, of Bloomington, Minn., Mrs. Knutson is survived by two sisters, Helen Riets of Devil's Lake, N.D., and Crystal Greguson of Edina, two grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on October 12, 1996, on Page 1001052 of the National edition with the headline: Coya Knutson, 82, Legislator; Husband Sought Her Defeat. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe